The Dust Specks for Torture Counterexample and Dostoevsky's Counterexample.

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This video is part of the playlist: "In Defense of Utilitarianism". This playlist is meant to be a lighthearted introduction to the Utilitarian theory, with some bad humor, where we analyze some of the strongest counterarguments and counterexamples that have been made against it.
The novelty and complexity of the playlist will scale up with the video number.
The intent is educational, both for me- I can be corrected or critiqued by the audience- than for the audience - that may learn something new.
(I am going to remake some of my earlier videos since I feel like I have learned a bit more on how to communicate more effectively in this medium and now find some of my starting videos subpar).
(Also, there are going to be videos on the repugnant conclusion, abstract counterexamples, and the complexity of the utilitarian framework along with a lot of other stuff)
Abstract:
One of the many purported counterexamples to Utilitarianism is based on the fact that the immense suffering a person experiences by being tortured can be dwarfed by a small pain happening to an immense amount of people: a counterintuitive result. In defense of Utilitarianism, we provide the two most popular compelling rebuttals that have been explored in the literature.
The first questions our moral intuitions on the matter while the second expands on the Utilitarian framework.
Other Thoughts:
1) Other than being unelegant thresholds can have their own problems.
See www.amirrorclear.net/academic/...
for an explanation of the issue.
2) There might be something to be said for the abstractness of the setting even in the case of the hangnails for torture counterexample, but because we have already stressed how abstract counterexamples can be dismissed (many) other times we chose to focus on other rebuttals.
3) Another possible rebuttal I was thinking about while making the video is that simply knowing that a person is being tortured could preclude one from achieving the highest levels of eudaimonia. So a single person being tortured could negatively affect everyone else more than a speck of dust in their eye. Even worse would be if one had the knowledge that a person was tortured to prevent him from getting a speck of dust in their eye.
If one were then to assume that the torture was performed in secret the stochastic nature of our world would make it hard for it to be perfectly concealed forever.
4) We use ordinals numbers to give an intuitive and quick example of a way to introduce thresholds. This may be equivalent to imposing a lexicographic ordering even though there might be some issues related to the fact that the canonical definition of addition on the ordinals is not commutative. Anyway, utilizing ordinals is non-standard, so be wary.
5) We should probably choose which rebuttal we think is best. The choice is difficult so maybe tomorrow we will decide.
6) Also, there might be something to be said about the fact that, in a real-world scenario, somebody has to "set up" the torture, and this "setting up" of the torture could carry negative utility than would be in addition to the suffering of the person being tortured.
Citations:
Larry S. Temkin, A Continuum Argument
for Intransitivity, Philosophy & Public Affairs
Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer, 1996), pp. 175-210.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880.
John Broome, Weighing lives, 2006.
Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives,
Alastair Norcross, Philosophy & Public Affairs,
Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 1997), pp. 135-167.
Our Intuitive Grasp of the Repugnant Conclusion, Johan E. Gustafsson.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1952.
How to accept the transitivity of better than, Justin Klocksiem,
Philosophical Studies, volume 173, pages1309-1334 (2016).

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22 июл 2024

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Комментарии : 15

@TheShattubatu 3 года назад

"[Lower the speed limit to] 55?? That's ridiculous! Sure, it'll save a few lives, but millions will be late!" - Homer Simpson

@Mon000 3 года назад

Who is this brilliant philosopher you are quoting and does he have published papers?

@DerUnbekannte 3 года назад

could have ended the video at 1:23; seems good to me, just get rid of the dust :D

@ledomedo5876 3 года назад

The lad is teasing RC like avengers endgame.

@abmarnie9 3 года назад

Great video as always

@evanshraga2794 3 года назад

I have a problem with utilitarianism assigning infinite utility to something. In the end, you compared infinite to infinite, but what if we compare finite to infinite? By the way, I will use pain unit to indicate the actual strength of the pain being felt. According to the ending, there is a disconnect between the pain unit and the negative utility. Imagine that the dust specks has a “pain unit” of 1. Imagine that the torture has a pain unit of 1,000. Now, as we increase the pain units, the negative utility increases. However, according to this theory, the one unit has a finite amount of negative utility, while the thousand pain units has infinite negative utility. This means that somewhere between one and one thousand pain units, the utility switches from a finite number to an infinite number (a number can be either finite or infinite; there is no in between). Say that 500 pain units has infinite negative utility, while everything under it has a finite amount of negative utility. This would mean that 499 pain units has a very high amount of negative utility, but not an infinitely high amount. So now if we compare 499 pain units and 500 pain units, we can see that no matter what, I should choose the 499. So, even though 499 and 500 are very similar in terms of pain, I should choose 100 years of 499 pain unit torture instead of one hour of 500 unit torture. Or I should torture 100 people for 100 years at 499 pain units of torture to prevent one hour of one person being tortured at 500 pain units.

@Mon000 3 года назад

Yes, you bring up a valid problem with thresholds that I believe I linked to in the video description. The argument you use is very strong. Personally, I am on the fence about whether thresholds have a place in the Utilitarian theory or not. A possible way to overcome your argument could be that thresholds are decided ad hoc, not basing oneself on units of pain. But that brings up other problems...

@blubblubber9460 3 года назад

It's possible that 3 seconds of 499 pain units is worse than 1 seconds of 500 pain units, but even a million seconds of 499 pain units will never be as bad as 5 seconds of 500 pain units, for example because 5s of 500 pain units will actually flip some switch in your brain, while 499 pain units will never be quite strong enough so it always is below some surface. I wouldn't be surprised if torture especially over longer times, I think can irreversibly damage your brain in a way that dust specks never could.

@blubblubber9460 3 года назад

Anther point is that people only have a limited attention span, or window of ... unifying experience, so you can't make the multiplier arbitrarily large (like so many times vs even more times), for a human still to notice a difference

@blubblubber9460 3 года назад

Also who is to say a human brain is even able to experience such a continuous spectrum of pain, where one kind of pain is just a modicum below another kind of pain. Like I mean sure, it could be possible that there is always a modicum of pain below, but there could still be plateaus where there is nothing inbetween Actually, even assuming there is such a scale of pain or suffering where everything is just below the other is already begging the question. Rather there could be different kinds of suffering that affect different parts of the brain and psyche in different way and are as such very hard to compare with each other.

@firstaidsack Год назад

What if we prioritize the utility per affected person rather than the total utility? At the end of the day, it's about the experience of individual beings, right?

@Mon000 Год назад

Humm I'm not quite sure what you mean, how would the calculus go?

@firstaidsack Год назад

@@Mon000 I'm not sure either lol, my initial thought was that we average the pain caused by the dust over all people and compare it to the pain caused by torturing one person. But I don't know how you could generalize this. But I have the intuition that adding the utility in one person should somehow be weighted more than adding the utility of several people. Like +100 utility for one person seems to be somehow more valuable than +100 total utility of 10 people who each gain +10 utility.

@Mon000 Год назад

@@firstaidsack Humm interesting I lean more to the opposite intuition haha. But at the end I think considering them equal is probably correct. What I have more doubts about is comparing negative utility to positive utility, there is something so viscerally different about suffering than happiness. But maybe it's just a problem of how we define the words.

@firstaidsack Год назад

@@Mon000 I noticed that I was thinking if an experience causes 10x more immediate happiness for one person, it will also have a greater long term effect which would make something that has 10x more utility in the short-term actually have even more utility, which would explain my intuition. So yeah, it's probably still equal if the +100 accurately reflects all consequences for the person. Yeah, it also seems to me that negative utility is somehow different. But on the other hand, we are often willing to do sacrifices (e.g. working hard) for the greater good.